I am finally back after about a month now. I was pretty lazy updating due to my addiction to computer games which I have been playing for hours together, and just lazing about doing nothing except eating and sleeping. As a matter of fact, I have already gained 2 kg, with absolutely no exercise.
Whoa, you people should have watched the apprentice this Sunday: 4 people were fired in a row in what was perhaps the most heated and the most powerful boardroom ever, .a.k.a. the Mother of All Boardroom Battles. The Donald just went: "You are all fired, all 4 are fired...! Go home ! Go home!" and Josh, Jennifer, James and Mark huddled together in the taxi back home.
Honestly speaking, I felt it was just way too extreme to fire 4 people just like that. This has never happened in the Apprentice so far and it has always been the weakest player that was fired. But looking at the way these guys performed, the 4 of them had to be fired at one go. Not only did they lose, they also lost badly, with a decline of 34 % decrease in sales, while the other team boosted sales by 71 %.
So what went wrong?
Well, from what I observed on Sunday, these are the 2 main reasons Excel lost:
1. They chose the wrong sport. Indeed! It is important to choose a sport which is up, coming and rapidly becoming popular to boost sales. As all of us know, baseball is one of America's national sports and so it is absolutely unnecessary to promote this sport in a sporting store, because almost every house will have an extensive collection of baseball cards, caps, balls and bats that no one will want to buy anymore baseball merchandise. So this in turn will lead to a poor sales event. And it was made worse by the fact that the baseball season was over in the US. Perfect timing...for the boardroom that is!
2. More importantly, Excel lost the main focus and objective of this task. This was supposed to be a sales event, not a baseball clinic. Form the setup of the store, it looked like an indoor baseball stadium and the teammates performed more like coaches teaching kids how to play baseball instead of promoting the sale of bats. This is NOT a baseball center, it's a department store! If you just set up the batting cage so large to try out bats, it's like giving these kids a free baseball lesson, but not promoting the products. It's good to try out bats, but you must also have come up with a marketing plan so that people would buy them. Indeed, as Marshawn and Rebecca noted, the products were pushed off to the side that no one ever saw them. To make matters worse, Jennifer was selling hot dogs and other foodstuff, changing this whole sales event into a family baseball carnival. Food was so popular that many potential customers bought food and did not buy the sports products, resulting in a huge loss of revenue. Oops, poor strategy...resulting in a huge loss. I have to admit though, the candidates of excel were enthusiastic and worked hard, but they failed to work smart.
So Josh would have felt very bad that he could not choose who to bring into the boardroom like other project managers did before him. Yup, it is indeed a big blow, but sorry, this was the worst loss in Apprentice history that Donald had to do something to prevent this from happening again.
OK, back to other matters...
Somehow this wait for the A-level results is taking away a load of energy from me. I can'thelp but just get more and more worried as the time goes by. It's quite sad that the results did not come out 1 week after the O-levels, as had been the practice in the past. It's probably going to come out at the same time of the year, on the 1st week of March, which is a very LONG wait.
And I have started reading storybooks, finally! I never used to like them anyway because I have always hated fiction but I decided to read Robinson Crusoe properly from start to finish, and it's actually quite interesting, contrary to what I thought....
Well, that's all...
(P.S. Jennifer M's photo was taken from her official website:
www.jennifermurphy.biz. Photos of Josh, James and Mark were taken from the
Yahoo Apprentice Website.
posted @ 3:00 PM
